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Hello from Las Vegas! I am down in Las Vegas for the Autodesk Forge DevCon and Autodesk University. A total of four days of an absolute fire hose of information and learning! I have a few minutes of downtime and I wanted to provide an update on the new direction of consuming platform specific services in your portable project.

In my original post, I showed you how Prism would use the Xamarin Forms built in dependency service to resolve an object if it couldn’t find it in the container that Prism uses. That was the accepted practice for version 6.3 and earlier, but now, in the upcoming 7.0 release, the authors have specified that all object resolution should be done via the Prism container.

Fortunately it is pretty easy.

In Prism, there is an interface that you implement for each of your platforms: IPlatformInitializer where T is your Prism container. I typically use Unity, so my implementation would look something like this:

From there, it goes into your App object that is derived from your selected container specific PrisApplication class. The constructor takes one parameter of IPlatformInitializer which you just move along to the base constructor.

And there you go: all of your registrations controlled directly within Prism for a one stop shop for managing them.

I will add one small caveat to the information above. I wrote most of this from memory while sitting in a hallway at the Sands Convention Center. Prism is going through a number of changes from 6.3 to 7 and I might have mis-spelled a class name. But I think it should stand up fairly well.

One question that I have had a few times now is how do I integrate platform specific implementations of services into the Prism Framework? It’s not hard, in fact, you don’t have to do anything at all! Let’s take a look at how it works. I am going to focus on the Unity container: it’s my favorite for no other reason than it was the first container I started using and it has always worked well for me across all different .NET projects. The other containers have similar capability.

Recap Abstracting Platform Services

All the platforms have very similar capabilities, especially in the case of Bluetooth, Bluetooth LE, GPS, text-to-speech etc., but each of these capabilities requires a platform specific process of consuming them. I am sure most know that an interface needs to be created the portable/shared project and then platform specific implementations in each of the platform projects. But here is a quick recap of what it looks like.

Portable/Shared Project

Create your Xamarin Forms project and use nuget to add Prism.Unity.Forms. The latest stable release at the time of writing was 6.3.0. Once you have your project created, you would need to create your interface definition. Everyone loves to use text-to-speech for these kinds of samples, so let’s do that.

public interface ITextToSpeech
{
void SayIt(string text);
}

For each of the platforms the parts that we are interested in for the sake of the article is pretty much the same. I won’t reproduce the actual speech code here, but if you are interested in how it is done, there is a good sample on the Xamarin developer site.

As promised, each of the platform implementations look the same and this is the pattern you would follow even if you weren’t using a framework like Prism. The key is the attribute just above the namespace statement that registers your implementation with the Xamarin Forms dependency service.

Consuming in ViewModel

Normally we would consume the service in the view model using the following pattern:

How does Prism do that? It creates a special extension to the Unity container (similar capabilities exist within the other containers) that basically say to the container if the requested interface isn’t registered in the container, look for it in the Xamarin Forms DependencyService. That’s pretty cool! No additional work is required and you right away have a more testable and maintainable solution. If you are interested in seeing what this looks like, you can look at theDependencyServiceStrategy class and the ConfigureContainer method in the PrismApplication class.

Alright, last time we looked at UWP, and now we will look at iOS. It is a pretty similar effort to UWP. All we need to do is declare the protocol handling and then handle the URL.

Declaring the Protocol

First we have to edit the info.plist file in the iOS project. This file needs to be modified by hand and is just a simple XML file. The plist element is the root element and contains a “dict” object. Each element of the dict object is a setting for the app and it is contained in pairs. For example:

All that is happening above is that when the app is activated because of the protocol that it has registered, it will look at the URL and extract the response code that was returned by Forge. It will then use that response code in a REST API call to get the authorization token and refresh token. If that is successful, we perform a navigation to the next page in our app. Obviously the code isn’t complete as it doesn’t handle any kinds of errors. For the details on how to get the authorization and refresh tokens see the previous post.

Introduction

In our last post, we looked at what we needed to do to setup our shared/portable project to authenticate with Autodesk Forge. Almost all of the code the important code is in the shared area, but we do have to do somethings within each of the platform projects. Lets check out UWP.

Protocol Declaration

The first thing that I do is go into the Package.appxmanifest in the UWP project. Once you are in it, click on the “Declarations” tab. On this tab, you can declare lots of different things for your app: able to pick files, camera settings, background tasks among others. The one we are interested in is protocol.

Select protocol and add it to the list of the supported declarations. Give the protocol a name check “ExecutableOrStartPageIsRequired”. For the name, make sure that you give it something unique. Perhaps an abbreviation of your company followed by some kind of app designation.

Override UWP Application.OnActivated

In the UWP platform project, you need to override the Application.OnActivated function to handle the deep-link. Normally Xamarin Forms will just route the URI request to OnAppLinkRequestReceived, but it doesn’t seem to be working for UWP (or iOS). So what we will do, is just call in to a new entry point which then delegates to the protected function.

All that is happening above is that when the app is activated because of the protocol that it has registered, it will look at the URL and extract the response code that was returned by Forge. It will then use that response code in a REST API call to get the authorization token and refresh token. If that is successful, we perform a navigation to the next page in our app. Obviously the code isn’t complete as it doesn’t handle any kinds of errors. For the details on how to get the authorization and refresh tokens see the previous post.

And that is it for UWP, just a little bit of code and we are back in our shared code base. Up next will be iOS.

It Finally Happened. I picked up my first Mac computer in January. I am now the proud owner of a MacBook Pro 13, no touch bar and the regular keyboard. I went into the local Apple Store and tried out the newer keyboard and the older keyboard and have to say that I liked the feel of the old one better. I really didn’t like how loud the new keyboard was. But the old keyboard was good, trackpad was good (but not as good as I thought it was going to be) and the screen was nice. Overall a nice computer if expensive. But the important thing is that I could finally install XCode and build iOS apps!

And that is the subject of the this blog post. In the previous blog post, we looked at creating a custom renderer for Android. Now we will look at doing the same with iOS. With iOS, things are simpler in at least one regard: you don’t have to go get an access key for your app.

One thing I want to make clear after some questions from others. This information isn’t a whole lot different than what you can get from developer.xamarin.com. But it builds on those examples by making the custom map renderer updatable from your view model … if you are using data binding of course. If you aren’t using data binding, you can skip all of this and just follow the guide in the above link.

If you are still here …

I didn’t change anything in my CustomMap class in the shared project. All updates are in the iOS project. In here I have defined two classes: CustomMKAnnotationView and CustomMapRenderer. Let’s talk about CustomMKAnnotationView class first: it is the simpler.

The CustomMKAnnotationView class derives from MKAnnotationView. It adds a couple of new properties for the Id of the marker and a URL associated with the marker. Otherwise there is not a lot to be excited about. So lets move onto the CustomMapRenderer class.

The CustomMapRenderer class derives from MapRenderer. The first thing is that we have to override the OnElementChanged method. Just like Android, this either hooks up the native map to the cross platform map class in the shared project or unhooks it.

The most important things above are that you get a reference to our CustomMap object that was defined in the shared project; and also get a reference to the native map object (MKMapView).

Using the native map object from above, we can hook into events for it. We use these events to display the pins on the map and the info window when a user taps one of the pins.

Let’s take a look at the GetViewAnnotation method. This is the method that is used to show a custom marker on the map. In it we are passed in a reference to the marker. We use our GetCustomPin method to look up the information associated with the marker. In an effort to conserve memory, the map can reuse the view: and that is what is happening with the call to DequeueReusableAnnotation. If we can’t reuse, then we create a new one, specifying the image for the pin itself, and customizations for the callouts.

Next we can take a quick look at the OnDidSelectAnnotationView. This is called when the user taps on the pin. You have the option of doing something custom … or just select the default that was setup in the GetAnnotationView function. In our case, we are going to see if the marker is associated with ID 1, and if it is, add in a custom image. Otherwise, we are just going to accept the default.

The OnDidDeselectAnnotationView method is called when the extended annotation is displayed and the user taps somewhere on the map, it will get rid of the extended information and free up the resources.

Finally, let’s take a look at OnCalloutAccessoryControlTapped. After the user taps on the pin, extra data is displayed about the pin. If you tap on the extra data, this function is called. You can look at the information associated with the pin and act on it. In our case, we are going to grab the url and navigate to it.

And now just for a recap. If we want to make the custom map respond to our view model we have to listen for changes from the data binding system. This is almost exactly the same as the Android implementation where we override the OnElementPropertyChanged and listen for our property.

I find it pretty amazing that Xamarin Forms is able to share so much of the code. Really all we are doing in the separate projects is the presentation: all of the business logic is shared between all. Very cool.